PAF Series, Penkridge and Stafford

Isaac was at school on Saturday morning so I planned to drop him off and then head off to the new PAF (‘phone a friend’) series just north of Wolverhampton. This is a circular walk involving 18 caches, 2 of which are Multi’s and the rest being Traditionals. The twist is that none of the caches have a cache container size specified and virtually all of them have no hints at all.

At GZ with one of the logbooks from the PAF series

I parked up by the first cache and started to look for it. A constant stream of dog walkers started to come past, almost as if they were waiting for me to arrive! I thus decided to return for this one at the end of the walk and headed off for the next cache.

Part of the PAF series takes you along the Shropshire Union Canal

Once I’d got into the swing of things, and my geo-senses had finally woken up (!) I made light work of most of the caches. My only real problem was at #7 where the cache was nowhere to be found. I tried my only PAF’s of the series just to check I’d not missed something obvious (would not be the first time!). The first PAF could not remember the cache at all, but the second confirmed I was in the right place and it looked like the cache was missing. I got 2 PAF calls myself about cache #7 later in the day and it was then confirmed the cache really was missing and had now been replaced (quick work for the cache owner there – can’t fault that for service ;-)).

Which way next? On the PAF walk somewhere.

After I’d finished the series I grabbed cache #1 on the way back to the Jeep and headed off for a few other caches in the immediate area. Nothing too taxing here and I soon ran out of caches to do. What to do next then? Head over towards Walsall / Cannock or up towards Stafford, both of which had a good few caches I could aim for.

The photo I was not allowed to post with my log as it apparently contains a spoiler! I won't say which cache it is though.

Stafford won out and I thus drove up to Penkridge to find the 4 Food Trail caches we’ve been meaning to do for ages. They were all nicely themed with good hides and fun containers. Heading up towards Stafford, I picked off a series of 4 new caches along a Bridleway near Brocton. No problems here except the last one was nowhere to be seen and when I got home later on I saw the cache owner has taken it back home as it had been muggled by children and wrecked.

Heading off to one of the Wizard of Oz caches

Stafford was REALLY busy when I arrived so I had to do a bit of creative routing to get me to the caches without getting stuck in traffic for too long. I had another very lengthy search for two Wizard Of Oz themed caches near Stafford Grammar School. The first one was nowhere to be seen (and has since been confirmed as missing by the cache owner). The second one was 20m or so away from the co-ords so was found more by luck than good judgement.

View from GZ at one of the Newport caches. That's the old canal that is now a designated SSSI below.

Time was getting on by now but I just had time to pick off a couple of quick caches near to Norton Bridge on the way to Eccleshall and onwards to home. I also picked off our two closest to home not founds in Newport on my way home.

40 finds for the day. Here is a link to the Everytrail plot of our route.